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Comment by Avicebron | Hacker News Reader

> "The problems that afflict my community are running water, drug addiction, lack of educational resources, and secular trends have have made our traditional industries obsolete"

So in my rural, predominantly white "Non DEI target" part of the country, this is the problem too except when these people apply to hundreds of jobs in software engineering they get crickets.

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Well, just one data point for you (YMMV), but in "DEI" contexts I've been a part of, class diversity did actually come up somewhat regularly. I would not say corp diversity efforts I saw were all that successful in staffing that demographic—but they also weren't that successful in staffing minorities either. Mostly I think this reflects a consistent disconnect between what people wanted corp diversity efforts to be, and what they really were.

With all that said I do have a story of my own like this. In 2013 or so I wrote some stuff about spam detection and a Twitter engineer reached out about a job. I was an outgoing new grad from the University of Utah. When I got through with the loop the recruiter said, "How did you get here, we don't get many candidates from Utah." I still wonder what they wanted me to think when I heard that. What I actually felt was deeply out of place and uncomfortable. And it has affected every hiring process I've been apart of since.

I always bring this up to extremely woke people. I grew up at the poverty line in rural Minnesota with a blue collar truck driver father, divorced parents, in a trailer park. I don’t say this to get sympathy, I am proud I overcame it. But DEI and other race based (vs economically/financially based) affirmative action is just racism in a different outfit. Are the white people living below the poverty line all across America “privileged”? Certainly not, and as you said, on top of that they are immediately disqualified from so many types of aid. Imagine applying for college and seeing every other minority under the sun have scholarships specifically for them: women, black people, Asians, etc. White male from poverty? lol not you, you’re privileged. It’s ridiculous and it’s been going on since I was in college over 10 years ago.

Well, in the non-DEI world, we'll soon find out if the reason this happens was solely because of policies or if low educational attainment seeps into one's college, ones preparedness for a job, one's ability to get a job, etc.

but you do see the problem here. Its not the "DEI targets" that are at fault, its the systematic roll back of any protection for any poor community.

The same people that are saying "a new way forward" or "make america great again" failed to put any money to help. Your community doesn't produce anything that those funding congress care about, means that you get nothing.

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